3Nomads, Territorial States, and Microsocieties

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A painting of the parade of foreign peoples. People present annual tributes and gifts to king Thutmosis 3 in the presence of Vizier Rekhmire. The gifts include crafts, vessels of gold and silver, animals like dogs, oxen with curved horns, a baboon, giraffe, feline, baby elephant, a bear, and horses. They also present elephant tusks, a chariot, and vases, some of which are gold.

Around 2200 BCE, the Old Kingdom of Egypt collapsed. The collapse did not occur because of incompetent rulers, of which there were many, or a decline in the arts and sciences, which is evident in unfinished building projects; the Old Kingdom fell because of radical changes in climate—namely, a powerful warming and drying trend that blanketed Afro-Eurasia between 2200 and 2150 BCE. The Mesopotamians and Harappans were as hard hit as the Egyptians. (For more on the impact of climate change in the river-basin cultures, see Current Trends in World History: Climate Change at the End of the Third Millennium BCE in Egypt, Mesopotamia, and the Indus Valley, in Chapter 2.)

In Egypt the environmental disaster yielded a series of low floods of the Nile because the usual monsoon rains did not arrive to feed the river’s upper regions. With less water to irrigate crops, farmers could not grow enough food for the river basin’s million inhabitants. Documents from this period reveal widespread suffering and despair. Consider the following tomb inscription: “All of Egypt was dying of hunger to such a degree that everyone had come to eating his children.” Or another: “The tribes of the desert have become Egyptians everywhere. . . . The plunderer is everywhere, and the servant takes what he finds.” Herders and pastoral nomads also felt the pinch. As these outsiders pressed upon permanent settlements in search of food, the governing structures in Egypt—and elsewhere, in Mesopotamia and the Indus Valley—broke down. The pioneering city-states of the third millennium BCE may have created unprecedented differences between elites and commoners, between urbanites and rural folk, but everyone felt the effects of this disaster.

This chapter focuses on two related developments. The first focus is the impact of climate change on the peoples of Afro-Eurasia: famines occurred, followed by political and economic turmoil. The old order gave way as river-basin states in Egypt, Mesopotamia, and the Indus Valley collapsed. Herders and pastoral nomads, driven from grazing areas that were drying up, forced their way into the heartlands of these great states in pursuit of better-watered lands. Once there, they challenged the traditional ruling elites. The nomads also brought with them a new military weapon—the horse-drawn chariot. Nomads and their chariots form the second focus of this chapter, for chariots introduced a type of warfare that would dominate the plains of Afro-Eurasia for a half a millennium. The nomads’ advantage proved only temporary, however. Soon the Egyptians, Mesopotamians, Chinese, and many others learned from their chariot-driving conquerors: they assimilated some of their foes into their own societies and drove others away, adopting the invaders’ most useful techniques. This chapter also examines worlds apart from the expanding centers of population and politics, where climate change and chariot-driving nomads were shaping world history. The islanders of the Pacific and the Aegean did not interact with one another with such intensity—and therefore their political systems evolved differently. In these locales, microsocieties (small-scale, loosely interconnected communities) were the norm.